ALERT: If You Have a Yahoo Account, You’ve Already Been “Scanned” By Obama Admin

For most Americans, privacy — particularly from the government — is one of the most sacred rights we enjoy in this country, and we tend to scrutinize any infringement upon those rights heavily.

However, if you have an email account with Yahoo, your cyberspace privacy was likely infringed upon in 2015 by the federal government as the service provider reportedly complied with a directive to scan millions of customers’ incoming emails in real time to determine if they contained any information that might be useful to U.S. intelligence.

In the past, intelligence officials have requested to look at messages that were already stored on a server. This directive led to the first known instance of an email provider scanning through all incoming emails on the fly for information, according to Reuters.

“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,’” Albert Gidari, a lawyer with an expertise in surveillance issues, explained. “It would be really difficult for a provider to do that.”

The term “selector” is used to describe a search term employed to zero in on specific information.

Yahoo accomplished the directive by secretly building a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for the requested “selector” — although what exactly the U.S. intelligence community was looking for has not been released.

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It was also unknown what specific data the email service provider actually handed over, or if intelligence agencies had requested similar information from other providers.

Yahoo has defended its actions, telling Reuters that it is a “law-abiding company” that “complies with the laws of the United States.”

This controversial search of its email accounts comes on the heels of an announcement in late September that at least 500 million Yahoo accounts were stolen from the company in 2014, according to USA Today.

The stolen information could include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, Yahoo explained.